Saturday, May 15, 2010

Polly Stenham's That Face - famously written when she was 19 - is most often compared to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - not least because the anti-heroine in both plays is called Martha. Both Marthas are badly behaved, addictive older women, and both have an incestuous passion for their sons, even if in Albee's version the son is imaginary. But it strikes me that a more pertinent comparison is with Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Stenham's Martha is more like Blanche DuBois: a fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe curve.

The play reads very much as a precociously talented first work; it has an undeniable dramatic force that is dampened by some crudities in its structure and characterisation. For all that, it swept the British theatre awards when it premiered at the Royal Court in 2007, and productions around the world have quickly followed. It's easy to see why it attracted such attention: a palpable sense of urgent truthfulness drives the play past its flaws into a genuinely cathartic climax.

In That Face, Martha (Sarah Sutherland) is the inexorable gravity at the centre of the action. She is alone after a bitter divorce from her husband Hugh (Dion Mills), a wealthy suit who lives in Hong Kong with his new wife and child. Her son Henry (Tim Potter), a budding artist, has devoted his life since he was 13 to caring for her, convincing himself that if he can only keep her out of hospital, she will recover. His sister, Mia (Lauren Henderson), is regarded by her mother as an unwelcome rival for Henry's affections.The play opens with a scene where Mia and her prep school friend Izzy (Lucy Honigman) are hazing a younger student, in an initiation ritual that goes badly wrong when Izzy Mia drastically overdoses the student on valium, stolen in the first place from Mia's mother. Mia's threatened expulsion prompts Hugh to fly back from Hong Kong, and Henry, boiling with resentment at his father's betrayal of his old family, panics that Hugh will "fix everything up" and have Martha involuntarily committed, thus making his failing efforts of the previous five years utterly meaningless.

What That Face lacks in complexity - Hugh, for example, is little more than a cipher in a suit - it makes up for in its precise observations of a family locked in the crisis of mental illness. (Anyone who thinks the actions here are exaggerated histrionics hasn't seen psychosis in action). But this play is more than a study of the effects of mental illness, and the common predicament of children caring for dysfunctional parents. It's also a scathing indictment of British middle class brutalisation, with the clear implication that the extreme emotional alienation Stenham articulates in all her characters is not only pathological, but endemic.

The fact that the opening scene is in a boarding school - central to the mythos of the British class system - is crucial. Not one of Stenham's characters - from the supposedly "normal" father Hugh, who seems emotionally cauterised, to the schoolfriend Izzy - knows how to relate to other people. The only characters who might be said to feel genuine love for each other, Henry and Martha, exist in a haze of destructive, incestuous mutual dependency. The only character who acts with any dignity is the one with the acknowledged mental illness, Martha, when she makes her Blanche DuBois exit for the mental hospital.

There's an unspoken history here that is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire, fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its poignancy, is from Michael Apted's 7-Up series: the unhappy middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents' divorce, introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit in the background.

This resonance simply doesn't translate to Australia: yes, we have class in our society, but it's quite a different deal here. We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don't function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles's decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.

This lack of clarity extends to the design, a bare curve of beige carpet sweeping up the back of the stage, with Henry and Martha's bed a sunken pit to the side of the stage. Instead of making the play more lucid, as is probably the intention, it makes it less so, muddying the transitions between scenes. But most crucially, I often felt the performances lacked an understanding of the pathologies the play explores. Tim Potter as Henry gives us a bravura performance, and after an initial uncertainty Sarah Sutherland creates a convincing portrayal of Martha. Dion Mills does his best with the thankless task of humanising Hugh, but neither Lauren Henderson nor Lucy Honigman manage to convey the pathological alienation of their characters.

Still and all, it's a creditable production of an interesting play. Stenham appears to be that rarest of beasts, a natural dramatist. If her subsequent plays bear out the promise of this one, she will be well worth looking out for.

I think your criticism is misplaced. There certainly is a class system in this country, though less perceptible from a particular accent. It's quite clear that the characters in the play come from an upper-middle socio-economic strata and this does not need to underlined by the use of English accents. Thus, the director's decision.

Of course it needs to be underlined by accent. This is an English play. The boarding/public school culture is intrinsically English. There is absolutely a class system in Australia but to claim it is in any way comparable to its English equivalent is absurd.

The assumption that we can transfer any English or American play into an Australian idiom because we all peak English is feeble. It wouldn't wash the other way round.

It's a delicate question. I don't have any hard and fast rules about moving between different Anglo cultures: it really depends on each particular play. But in this case I think the misreading of the alienation and brutality of the characters was linked to the class issue. It's very culturally specific; ie, I thought this a very English play (my question is not about posh accents, far from it, but a particular social and psychological structure, which is to do with a particular history). Some plays transcend their place, but I think this one lost something quite crucial in its shift to Australianness, without gaining anything. British class systems just don't equate with Australian ones.

This play does not need to be set within English culture to work for an audience. I'd ask other people who've actually seen it to reply on that score. It may well be that the English class system/boarding school values are especially pronounced in the motherland but it is false to argue that you can't have the same degree of alienation and dislocation here. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to create the English accents (and at Red Stitch you'd at least get decent ones) but this was not felt to be essential for the director and neither, I note, was it chosen for the Belvoir production in February which also did very well with Australian audiences. There are arguably other, perhaps greater, issues at work in the play.

I think you're missing my point. If you read the review again, you might understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about degrees of alienation - I'm perfectly aware that it happens everywhere - but of a particular English quality of it, which is also reflected in the diction of the play. I hardly said the production failed because of it. And I am, after all, an audient too.

And you miss my point: Often a play is performed in 'neutral' accent. To argue that a particular English quality of alienation is less present as a result of removing the accent is wrong. Otherwise you might as well say that The Three Sisters is less effective when performed by Australian actors, unless you force them to perform in cod-Russian circa turn-of-century accents. It's a directorial choice and, in this instance, doesn't attempt to locate That Face in Australia - it merely removes the linguistic associations which affect our reception of the subject matter.

I certainly at no point claimed that Australian accents inevitably reduce a foreign play: in other instances, I've wonder why they haven't been used, and I had no problem with the Australian accents in Fat Boy. I simply perceived in this case a specific argument about contemporary British class that was lost by performing it in Australian accents, and I wished that dimension could also have been present. Of course Australian accents locate it in Australia, however abstracted that theatrical space might be. But I think we'll have to agree to differ here.

I should finesse that argument about accent: an Australian accented production of Chekhov will still be set in Russia, for instance. I think with Anglo plays, the question is more difficult and subtle: it all depends. It's hard to imagine an Australian-accented version of Sam Shepard working with the same force as the original, for instance, because of the rhythms built into the language. Other plays will transfer fine. A similar problem to the Shepard issue here, magnified by the class issue.

Having seen the play, and feeling like I needed a stiff drink at the end of it, I have to put my two cents worth in.

I liked that they had Australian accents. We're in Australia, watching Australian accents, and mental health issues and the carers of those with mental illness are just as relevent here as anywhere else.

None of the actors had pronounced "strine" so to me it worked beautifully, and also the play was so engaging, the accents were lost in the swirl of madness.

I'll be interested to see how this compares with the New York reaction to That Face (which is opening here soon in a production directed by Sarah Benson). It will be a peculiar case study indeed: Benson is a British woman, and class and caste are even more deliberately swept under the rug in the U.S. than they are perhaps in your neck of the woods. She may or may not bring this dimension to her production, and if she does, it may be regarded as provincialism (not a possibility to be treated lightly, as the controversy around the closing of Enron has shown) or something broader.

Hi George - I've speculated on US responses. I'll be interested to see what happens. There are some big differences between Australia and the US - one being that here we are still part of the Commonwealth and still acknowledge the Queen as our Head of State. Unlike the US, Australia still functions in many ways as a colonial society, although in the 60s and 70s the focus moved from the UK to the US. Even so, we get a lot of British cultural input here that makes these class issues recognisable in a way that is probably not the case in the US, where it seems all tv and film gets translated into American. Ie, you are the Empire these days in the Anglo world. Our language is still closer to Britain than the US - we use British spellings and locutions, although over the past few decades of course our English has become very inflected by US usage as well. (Spelling recognise with a "z" is still, in some quarters, regarded as "bad English" and the end of civilisation).

Maybe if I had found this production more convincing, the question of cultural specificity might not have bothered me. My being first generation British - worse, a first generation upper middle class British migrant, with complications - no doubt feeds into my reaction to the play. The British reviews tend to focus on the class issue, if not in the way I did. But there's absolutely no doubt in Britain that this play was read through class, and I think resonated for that reason.

It does raise an interesting question about plays written in English, which I think applies much less to plays in translation. When we know a play is translated, we allow a certain dislocation. I love Shakespeare in Australian accents - it releases him into the present in what is very often completely liberating ways. With contemporary plays, especially those coming out of contemporary issues, the question strikes me as more vexed. In this case, the cultural dislocation was - for me - every bit as bad as hearing a badly rendered accent. It might be a limitation of the play - David Harrower for example writes English that translates much more easily, and you'd never have this problem with Sarah Kane. But then, I also think that artists ought to be allowed their cultural specificity, without it being considered "parochial".

In the readings that were presented of Howard Barker's plays in New York recently (and Howard's one of the more self-consciously British and European of dramatists in recent years), director Jesse Berger directed his performers to use American accents: and this use provided a new dimension to Howard's plays, I think, one that considerably broadened their landscapes.

Yes, I suppose that's right: one person's laudable "cultural specificity" is another's reviled "parochialism." Depends on what side of the ocean you're standing on, I reckon. One would hope for minds broad enough to cross those oceans, but perhaps too much to hope for.

Barker's always been done in Australian accents here. In fact, it would be totally odd to do him with British accents: it would come across as affectation. But his language and imaginative world lends itself to a Shakespearean breadth of interpretation.

Wasn't someone telling me recently that I ought to emulate Ben Brantley, as one of those critics "who try to actually review rather than place their hands firmly on their hips and tell theatre makers what they are doing is pointless..."?

You never did answer my question as to what specifically were the crudities in structure and characterisation. The comment appears instead to have been deleted. Presumably this would involve some actual criticism.

The comment in fact was never posted. Perhaps you ought to make sure that comments have gone up here before accusing me of deleting posts. I rarely delete comments, and always welcome discussion.

To answer your question: the characters of Izzy and Hugh are basically one-dimensional and function mainly to drive the narrative, rather than characters in their own right. Alice doesn't exist as a character at all and I imagine would be a pretty thankless role. This is reflected in the play's structural weaknesses: it is at its strongest when dealing with the relationship between Martha and her son, and that is where it generates its power. The other stuff makes sense in terms of the class idea I was arguing, but is still a little sketchy, so the play takes a while to warm up. Like I said, it's a precocious first play. What I liked most was its sense of truthfulness.

How I tire of anonymous contributors who spoil these threads with their spite.

Anyway.

I haven't seen (and won't be seeing) this particular production, but I am interested in the subject of Voice more generally – and especially how accents can influence a work's geographic origins and imperatives (Tennessee Williams's great Southern Belles for example). When I studied acting, our voice teachers worked with us on received pronunciation (RP) which was considered the fundamental capability of an actor's vocal responsiblity. It was spectacularly difficult, but came to make perfect sense to me.

Tone, volume, resonance, impediment and accent were always studied and developed as an essential element of characterisation. This is why it's problematic for me to lay this all purely at the feet of 'accent' ... which, in true characterisation, is one, and only one, element of an actor's (and director's) choices: the way their particular character sounds.

Reading between the lines in this review, I'm wondering whether the whole issue of voice was under-realised – as it so often is.

A couple of issues here: the question of what you posit as actorly skill and capacity (yes, I agree, under-realised in some places); and a question of textual meaning as parsed not only through accent but directorial interpretation. Accent here seems to symbolise a more complex and tricky question of cultural understanding. Both questions are deeply inter-related, but they are different issues.

British critic Andrew Haydon talks about some of these complexities in a fascinating piece on his blog, which among many things addresses how THAT FACE is construed in different Anglo cultures (with reference to this review). Well worth a read.